Tag: regional English

I grew up in Bristol as a litlun called Melissal who enjoyed going down the slider and was considered a bit of a keener in school. But I experienced a fair amount of ridicule for my Bristolian accent even from other, posher Bristolians. Why Bristolian (aka Bristle) should be laughed at while other regional dialects are […]

You’re probably familiar with the woodlouse, but (unless they happen to be your field of study), you probably haven’t given them a great deal of thought lately. The more biologically-minded among you may throw around the Latin term isopoda for the order, and oniscus or armadillidium for the two common varieties, but to most of […]

Let’s have a look at regional words that arise in the distinctly creative sphere of insults. In particular, we will be investigating words used in Northern Irish English, though due to its strong links with other regional varieties—especially Scottish and Irish—some of these terms will be familiar to people hailing from other parts of the […]

A recent poll on OxfordDictionaries.com showed that 37% of our users would call a bread roll a bun, which makes it second only to roll as the most common way to say this. This is not, to me, what a bun would be, and so naively—with no concept of the can of worms I was […]

In these times of mass media and global communications, it is comforting to think that regional lexical variation in British English is alive and well—in fact it seems to be right up many people’s alley. When linguists set out to collect distinctive local vocabulary, one of the classic questions informants are asked is “What do […]

English, we often hear, is the world’s first truly global language, spoken in more places by more people than any other language in history. Partly this is so, simply, because there are more people today than at any previous time and because more of the world is known than was in Antiquity. In the time […]

There are some things I love to an unhealthy degree, such as The Shield, Russian imperial stouts, George Carlin’s comedy, mint chocolate chip ice cream, and Evil Dead 2. My heart beats equally fast for the Dictionary of American Regional English, which recently published its long-awaited final volume. I wrote about euphemisms from DARE—which documents […]

This past month saw the publication of the fifth volume (Si-Z) of the magnificent Dictionary of American Regional English, an ongoing lexicographic project that has, over the past five decades, been tracking down and cataloging the seemingly infinite varieties of American English. DARE concerns itself with many words and terms that might not appear in […]